Collection: Label Printers

Direct thermal or thermal transfer — this decides your running costs

A direct thermal printer marks heat-sensitive label stock and uses no ribbon at all. Fewer consumables, less to go wrong, and the right choice for despatch labels and anything with a short life. The trade-off is real: the print fades with heat, sunlight and abrasion, so a direct thermal label is not the one to put on an asset that must still be readable in three years. A thermal transfer printer melts ink from a ribbon onto the label and produces a mark that lasts — the correct choice for asset tags, laboratory samples, chemical labelling and outdoor use. It costs more per label because you are buying ribbon as well as stock. Getting this wrong is the most expensive mistake in the category, in both directions.

Resolution and speed

203 DPI is the standard and prints text and ordinary barcodes perfectly well. Move to 300 DPI when you are printing small labels, very dense 2D barcodes, or fine print on a compact asset tag — not otherwise, because you pay for it in speed. Print speed, quoted in mm per second, only matters once you are printing in runs; for a handful of labels a day the interface matters more.

Connectivity

USB suits a printer dedicated to one bench. Ethernet is the right answer for a shared device, because it does not depend on a host PC being switched on. Wi-Fi and Bluetooth cover mobile and forklift-mounted work and units that move between areas.

Order the media with the printer

A label printer is a consumables platform. Check that the label sizes, ribbon widths and core sizes you need are available for the model before committing a site to it — and remember that a thermal transfer printer needs ribbon in stock as well as labels.

Trade pricing and business accounts are available for UK organisations, and bulk orders are welcome — request a quote.